Online news framing of police and protesters: triple case study of the London Sarah Everard vigil, the 47th Athens Polytechnic Uprising rally and the Barcelona street disturbances in support of rapper Pablo Hasél

Abstract

This study investigates the online news framing of the police and protesters by looking at three protests in late 2020 and early 2021: the Sarah Everard vigil in London, the 47th Polytechnic Rally in Athens and the imprisonment of rapper Pablo Hasel in Barcelona. A total sample of 114 articles was gathered from two news outlets per case: The Guardian and The Telegraph for the vigil, EFSYN and Kathimerini for the rally, and El País and ABC for the Hasel protests. A qualitative content analysis guided by framing theory was conducted. Two main frames in relation to police actions were identified: the ‘police brutality’ frame and the ‘order-maintenance’ frame. The framing of the protesters appeared to be much more fragmented while two frames—‘health hazard’ and ‘victim’—characterised both groups on different occasions. Overall, this study found the framing to be dependent on the protest’s perceived level of deviance.